by Natalie Reid
Jessie Fifty-Fifty
The Complete Series
Parts 1-3
By: Natalie Reid
Part One: Dissonance
Part Two: Variance
Part Three: Resonance
Table of Contents
Part One: Dissonance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Two: Variance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Three: Resonance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part One: Dissonance
Chapter 1
The Shot Heard Round the City
The red-breasted finch flew across the cold October sky and rested on the top perch of a pine tree. This tree was a solitary and stoic figure that perpetually stood in the center courtyard of Bauchery’s League of Experimental Science. More commonly referred to as BLES, the building was a massive expanse of cement, steel, and plastics, branching out in five directions like an injured spider that had lost three of its legs.
Ruffling its feathers, the finch puffed out its chest to gather more warmth, and then gave out a small cheep before lighting off from the tree. On the top floor of the building, a young man named Tom Forty-nine-Fifty-seven stared out the window and watched as the small finch arched in a circle above BLES, presenting itself as a brilliant red dot against the black cloud that forever clotted their sky.
For Tom, as well as for any careful observer that might have been watching the skies that afternoon, the appearance of the red bird was a magnificent sight. In fact, there were those living in Aero City that had never seen a bird before. Birds were rare relics of the old world, a world before The Contamination. They hardly ventured past the forest and into the city. It was as if they could sense the blackness that infected the people inside.
When the finch finally flew out of Tom’s sights and towards the nearby forest, he gave out a tired sigh. Behind him his lab waited. Several machines whirred as they ran experiments, and on the computer tablet in his pocket was a long list of jobs his boss had asked him to perform earlier that day.
He was about to turn away from the window, when a dark spot appeared on the horizon. As it grew larger and larger, he recognized it as a military transport ship. Occasionally BLES would receive them, and a slew full of soldiers would file out and into the wing of the building that had been set aside for the military. There they would undergo experimental testing, drug trials, anything that a scientist could give them in an attempt to make them better soldiers in the war against the Bandits.
However, as this plane turned in the sky and prepared to touch down on one of the five landing pads that the building offered, Tom realized that it was not headed for the military wing, but for his very own branch of the building. Before the transport ship landed, his tablet beeped, and the hurried voice of his boss, Doctor Tag Thirty-three-Thirteen, rang out through his pocket.
“Tom! Tom!” he shouted in childish excitement. “Get down to the Receival Room. We’ve got work to do!”
“What’s happened?” Tom asked, grabbing his tablet and holding it up to his mouth.
A crashing sound resonated through the line. He could hear his boss struggling with something before he announced proudly, “Someone’s died!”
Down in the Receival Room, commotion stirred the normally calm and measured atmosphere of BLES. The sound of the jet engine outside shook the walls as a stretcher was wheeled in. A man that bore the stripes of a military sergeant ran alongside it, shouting for a doctor to be brought. Tom hurried over to him, but when he caught sight of the body on the stretcher, he put his hand on the metal bar at the far end to keep the sergeant from wheeling it any farther.
“Sir, I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”
“Please!” the sergeant exclaimed, gripping onto the side of the stretcher in desperation. “You have to try!”
Tom stared down at the dead soldier and felt a small pang of remorse for refusing to treat her. She was a young woman, probably a year or two younger than himself, with brown hair, pale skin, and the gentle features of an honest face. He knew that she was probably someone that a great many people would miss, but he couldn’t change the fact that she had been blown open by a Bandit bullet. Blood soaked her green pilot uniform, and a large hole stood in her chest, gaping at him as if it was an eye of the Bandit that had shot her down.
He looked up to the sergeant and shook his head, respectfully apologetic. “She’s dead, sir. We can’t—”
He was cut off as his boss, Doctor Tag, came up from behind him and began wheeling the cart back into motion. “How long has she been dead?” he asked, bursting through the swinging doors of the Receival Room and racing through the hallway.
A small wave of hope washed over the sergeant’s face as he explained, “Just a few minutes.”
Tag stuck his tablet in his mouth and procured a needle from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” Tom whispered, staring at his boss in disbelief. “We can’t save her! She’s probably lost a lung and maybe even her heart!”
Tag spit the tablet from his mouth, causing it to fall onto the stretcher and bounce in between the soldier’s legs as they bounded down the hall. He swung around to the front and stuck the needle in her neck. As he did this, he looked up to his assistant and tapped two fingers on the side of his nose.
“Have a little faith in our work.”
“Can you save her?” the sergeant asked.
Tag could not keep a smile from escaping as he said, “Maybe! I’ve been developing a synthetic, reparative tissue for this very purpose, and she’s just the kind of human testing we’ve been waiting for.”
Tom was about to scold his boss for speaking so bluntly, but the sergeant nodded his head in understanding. “Anything you can do, doctor. I know the military will approve of any cost, any measure you can take.”
Though the word “cost” didn’t mean much to Tag, the phrase “any measure” was as close to music as words could get.
In the next few hours, everything was executed according to Tag’s orders. He may not have been the most respected scientist at BLES, but he still carried enough weight that those below him had to follow his commands without question.
So, when they dove inside the soldier and found that a lung and a piece of her heart were, in fact, no longer there, they got to work reconstructing organs and making history. Although he had to deal with the fact that the smok
e from the Bandit’s bullet might have already turned her, and that when she woke up she would be nothing more than a havoc-wreaking agent of the Black, he still remained positive. Such an outcome would have nothing to do with his work on her organs, he told himself. As long as she lived, he could prove his work successful—even if she had to be terminated directly after waking.
Throughout the surgery, Tag worked with the vigor and optimistic enthusiasm of a man that did not know defeat. Nothing stopped him from diving right back inside the soldier when one tissue sample after another did not want to hold.
The soldier had been brought to BLES headquarters at three-thirty in the afternoon, and it wasn’t until just before three in the morning that Tag and Tom sewed her back up and took a sigh of relief.
Tag sat down in his chair in the corner of the darkened room. He had turned the lights off to rest his eyes, and now the only light came from above the bed on the computer screen showing the soldier’s heart-rate. He wiped a hand across his forehead and nearly started laughing, for he felt so light and giddy. To have come out of such a long battle victorious! And not just victorious, but to have discovered such a breakthrough in human repairs… he was more than a little high on life.
Tom, however, was less elated. In fact, he was downright dead tired, as if he transferred some of his life force into this soldier in trying to revive her. But he didn’t seat his tired body in a chair and give up a triumphant sigh. Instead he trudged over to the door and poked his head through. The light from the hallway outside hurt his eyes and threatened to spill into the room and reveal the mad and bloody work that had been carried out in the forgotten hours of the night.
“Sergeant Denneck?” Tom called out, blinking and trying to see the man he knew to be sitting on the floor of the hallway.
“Yes,” he replied instantly.
Tom shifted his vision to the left, subconsciously pulling the door a little tighter around his head to make sure the man couldn’t see inside. Sergeant Denneck rose to his feet in one prompt motion, and was waiting with hands clasped behind his back, ready to hold back the emotion that was sure to come.
Tom gave a small nod of his head. “She’s alive.”
Denneck rested his back against the wall and pressed his palms to his eyes. When he pulled his hands away, he blinked fiercely and asked, “Can I see her?”
“In the morning.”
Denneck was about to object, but Tom quickly closed the door. A small feeling of guilt came over him as he glanced at the bloody bed in the center of the room.
“We should get someone in here to clean her up,” he said, directing his words as if to no-one.
“Never mind about that now, Tom!” Tag stood up and walked over to his assistant, clapping him on the back. “We did it! We did it!” He shook him a little forcefully to emphasize his point.
Tom pulled away from his boss and went to the desk on the far side of the wall. He leaned his body against the metal frame as he stared into the darkness of the floor. On the other side of the room he could hear Tag pull out his tablet. The small screen lit up his beaming face as his fingers tapped against it in excited elation.
“Did we really?” Tom asked after a while.
Tag gave a vague “hmm?” over in his direction, not looking up from his tablet.
“What did we save, really?” Tom asked. “I mean, she could be a Bandit for all we know. The people that saw the crash said there was enough Bandit smoke to turn even the strongest person.”
“I think she has a fairly good chance of making it,” Tag said with a satisfied nod. “Yes the smoke hit her—if she hadn’t ejected herself in time, she would have been taken up and racked.”
Tom winced at that last word, knowing just how horrible it was. Being racked meant having your ship taken over by Bandits and sitting there in helpless surrender as you waited to be taken up to The Black—to that cloud of shadow in space that had first borne the Bandits and infected everyone in Aero City with its darkness. Down on the ground The Black’s influence was easy enough to fight, but actually being forced into it meant certain loss of humanity, a fate worse than death. Tom was surprised at how easily his boss could reference to it.
But Tag saw nothing harsh in the way he spoke, and he kept on with his theory, saying, “But, if The Black is anything like a parasite, it should leave its host once it dies. This soldier was definitely dead when she was brought in. In all likely-hood, if she makes it through this, it’s probably dying that saved her. Kind of ironic when you think about it.”
Tom said nothing as he pulled himself away from the support of the table and walked over to her monitor. He wanted to know exactly who he had helped saved that night. Pushing a few buttons, he pulled up her personal information. However, he found that what should have been there, what would have been there for every other person in Aero City, was just…not.
Her father was labeled as unknown, and the word ERROR blinked in the place where her mother’s name should have been. Tom had never encountered a file like this before. Every person in Aero City needed to go to the Bank of Social Numbers on their twelfth birthday to receive their numbers and have their Potentian Band removed from their neck. It was known as a Potentian’s Evolution Day, for they were finally considered human once the Band connecting them to their mother was removed and they could breathe on their own. However, in order for any of this to happen, the Potentian’s blood must be tested and their parents labelled in the system. It didn’t make any sense for that information to be missing. The only real piece of insight that her file offered was that she had evolved into a human on December 22, 3033, and had been accepted by the military three days later.
In the dim light, Tom blinked his eyes, thinking that he had seen the numbers wrong. It would have meant that the military had accepted a three day old human into their army. Sure, she would have lived twelve years before as a Potentian, but accepting someone that had only been a human for three days—that was simply unheard of!
Then his eyes moved up the monitor. In the chaos of the night, he had not bothered to find out this soldier’s name.
Jessie Fifty-Fifty.
He looked down at the drained face of the sleeping girl below him and realized that she had no idea how ironic her name truly was. Those were the odds he gave her for waking up human.
* * *
The immaculate, white room on the top floor of the Bank of Social Numbers glared in Ual’s eyes. Though the outside of the building was a fantastic silver display of modern architecture, the white room showed no signs of the changing world. There were no computers in this room, at least none that were visible. Chairs had also been forgone, making the table in the center of the room seem superfluous. The reality was, it was an empty room—a room for thoughts, a room for decisions to be made without any distractions.
A man paced up and down the length of the long oval table. His name was Ward. He had a plain face and a clean suit, and his eyes were light and unassuming like those of a man that might serve you your morning coffee. He was also the President of Aero City.
“They say she’ll live,” Ual commented plainly.
Beside him, a lady in a blue suit huffed in disagreement. She had dark brown hair cut short so it looked like a boy’s hair-cut, and piercing blue eyes that seemed to be calculating even the most unimportant of details in everything she saw.
“No telling what condition she’ll be in once she wakes up though,” she mumbled, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
“I wouldn’t underestimate her,” Ual defended. His pale and slightly milky eyes flashed in anger as he said this.
“No,” Ward agreed, speaking for the first time since they had entered the white room. “I made that mistake ten years ago when she was here.” He shook his head. “Sarah’s daughter should have never been taken so lightly.”
“I told you we should have terminated her when we had the chance,” S said. Then, flicking her chin in Ual’s direction, added, “If it wasn’t for o
ldie over there, we wouldn’t be in this mess now. He’s the one that convinced you to let her live.”
“That’s because Sarah hadn’t told her anything!” Ual insisted. “My tests proved that. She didn’t know anything about her mother’s work or who her father was. She didn’t even know one word of the English language, only ours! There was not one dangerous piece of information in that child’s head. If there was, Sarah would have never brought her in. She could have just as easily removed the Potentian Band without our help and gone on living in secret.”
“Ual,” Ward said, silencing him by putting up a tired hand. “You don’t need to justify your past actions. What was done was done. I made the decision to let her live just as much as you did.”
His hand came down on the table and he tapped his fingers on the wood in deliberation. His two advisors were silent as he mulled over his thoughts.
“This city was built on rational principles,” he finally announced, digging one of his knuckles into the table. “We are nothing if not rational. Now, as the facts remain, I cannot say that we’ve fully lost Sarah’s daughter yet. I have to believe that Jessie may still one day be an asset to us, even more so than her mother was. All it takes is patience.”
“Ward, I don’t think—” S started to argue, but he shot her a glare.
“I wouldn’t look so disappointed yet, S. She may wake up to be a Bandit after all. Then Task Force will take care of her, and that will be an end to it. If it makes you feel better, I’ll even give the job to Commander Vin himself.”
“Commander Vin and all his men couldn’t find her when she was one day old! I’m telling you; don’t make the same mistake again. Now that she’s off the air-base, we have a chance to kill her before she does any damage.”
Ward shrugged. “I’ve made my decision. We aren’t having much luck with Sarah, so I say we go for the daughter. She is a powerful weapon we can’t just throw away.”
S shook her head and made for the door. “We’ll see how much you still want your weapon when she’s undermining your entire Task Force.”
